Unexpected Results for the Reward Area

I decided to export my world as it currently is and install it in my live game for testing.  Specifically, I wanted to see how the isolated area on the plateau connected (or didn't) with the rest of the lots down in the main town.  The results were... not what I expected.  Possibly more good than bad, but I think I'll have to re-evaluate my approach of an isolated area, simply for realism.  Before going into the details, let's look at some pictures of my test subject, Edward, experiencing his base camp and the campground.

Yay!  My world is selectable!  It installed perfectly.  And, look!  My little picture I selected is there.  *claps hands*

Edward's home came with ghosts!  Nice to confirm that these random challenges still exist in my world.  While I love this little campsite, I think I'd like to have some really houses up at the reward area.  What if someone wants to bring a family with them?  Is that a vampire ghost?  I'm not sure I've seen such a evil-looking ghost before.  A ghost hunter showed up to get rid of him, although Ed turned him down.  So at least we know service NPCs will show up on their own.

Ed walks from his campsite over to the main campground and goes for a swim.  It works!!! *cackles madly*

Ed gets out of the pool-pond without a problem, although he gets a face full of grass while he does it.  *rolls eyes*

No problem using the shower or toilet!

Back at home, Ed tests service NPCs again by ordering pizza.  No problem getting it delivered.  I followed the delivery person's car when they left, and it did the same thing as the ghost hunter's.  It drives down the road, makes a u-turn and then disappears.  So the service NPC just pop in and out of existence as needed.  I'm not certain what would happen with firefighters.  I didn't think of it at the time, but I think Ed may need to start a fire in the near future.

Now the weird stuff that forces me to rethink my approach to this area.  Several random townies showed up at the campground.  When I followed them, I found that they would drive their car to the part of the road closest to the cliff edge, get out of their car and then... walk down the cliff face, whereupon they would run to a road and get back in their car.

Now, I ask you... does that look realistic?

I decided to send Ed to the tattoo parlor using a taxi, and he did the same thing.  >:(

On the one hand, it's good that service npcs can show up at the lots on the plateau.  On the other hand, this looks silly.  I don't know if I'd prefer that they give me some routing error message... I think I'd prefer they just wink out of existence and reappear on the bottom road.  I've looked at my routing map.  That area is unroutable for sims!  But I guess getting from one location to another outweighs routing.

Oh, this solution just came to me.... A subway.  I didn't want to have one in the world, but at this rate I'm going to have to add a road to connect up to the campground anyway unless I want everyone scaling the cliff all day long.  It still doesn't help with the firefighters (will they get out of their truck to run up the cliff, I wonder?), but using a subway terminal at the top and bottom would at least allow it to look isolated.  For those who don't have Late Night.... well, to be honest, the world sort of relies upon having all expansions, so maybe I won't worry about that.  It's simply a requirement.  Not that the world won't work without it...  you'll just have people running up and down the cliff.  If I don't use the subway terminal and go with a road instead, that will be a very long drive from, say, the beach up to the campground.  I personally don't want that.  Le Sigh.  Something to think about, I guess.

On a positive note, once Ed was down in the town, he got to visit some interesting places.  He stopped by Slocum's Ink for a quick read.

He took a spooky drive up Gothic Hill.  (ooo fog... spoooooky!) ;D

And then he went to the beach to catch the sunset.  Thank goodness I was able to make the boardwalk a road, because I wouldn't want to wait for a sim to run all the way down, particularly for those houses at the end of it.

I forgot to check where the sunset would be before choosing which way my town faced, but thank goodness you can see it from the town and it's not behind it over the mountains.  Phew!  Turns out it sets slightly to the right side of the town and makes a pretty picture with the lighthouse in front.

Well, that's enough for today, I suppose.  It looks like the poll is favoring using 10x10 residential lots instead of larger lots in the reward area, but since the area can't be made inaccessible to all but those who live there and service npcs, I will need to find another way to make it special.  If I have all rare and special items available up there, everyone in the town has access to them even if it's less convenient.  So the lots will  have to make up for it.  Perhaps I can create a contest to make some log cabins that are luxurious... say each room must give the Well Decorated or whatever it is moodlet.  No price limit.  We need our little rich area, too, right?  *laughs*

Starting to Fill in With Trees!

I've started to add in the trees!  While there's still a lot left to do and I haven't even decided how many and what types of trees I want to use in all of the areas, the areas are starting to fill in nicely.  I think I might leave several open areas with flower terrain paint, partially for the variety and partially to give people's graphics cards a break.  Anyway, take a look at some of the neighborhoods!

Here's an overall view:

The lighthouse is in a little bamboo forest next to the asian homes:

The cemetery will be placed on this hill along with Storix's house.  You can see the fog emitters in the woods although they shouldn't show up in live mode:

Cherry Lane is probably my favorite street in the game.  So cute!

 

I've added more trees around the campground and put in the Riel site.  I'm not sure if it should be community or residential.  Is it more useful to live there permanently or use it as a home away from home for those who decide to camp out and spend time gathering rocks and beetles all day long?

I hope you like the way things are shaping up!  I'm very excited about it.

Swimable Pond!

Anettesb had a great idea of turning the reward campground's pond into a swimable one as well as adding a kids area.  I think these are great ideas!

I've added some butterfly and beetle spawners as well as a nature trail.  It goes by the picnic and kids area which has several different play sets.

The pond has been separated into a fishable and a non-fishable (swimable) area.  If I can find that No Fishing sign, I'm going to put it up on the pool side.  This is my first time making a swimable pond and I think it came out well.  I have yet to test it, but that will have to wait until I add a sim in Edit in Game mode.

A Big Red Button Should Have Been Hard to Miss

So it turns out that the only thing you have to do in Edit in Game to get the waterfalls to show up is take the game off of Pause.  *sigh*  I'm such an idiot.  There's a huge red pause button in the corner and a border around the entire screen, but did I notice it?  No.  I had to read it in a forum.  ^.^  Anyway, did a few adjustments to the height of the falls and where the splash areas are.  They're looking pretty good, if I do say so myself.

I started working on filling in some of the details of the world.  Highest priority has been to get the "river" on the plateau to work.  When you dig into land in CAW, you only get water if you dig all the way down to sea level.  So to get water on an elevation you either have to put it in a lot (and use the pond tool) or use one of the river objects which are HUGE compared to the little area I needed to make it from my campground lake to the waterfall.  I decided to make the river on a lot and use water animations and rocks and plants around the edges to fudge the areas in between.  Here's a shot of how the campground is coming, and I'm really happy with the border area.

The rocks and cattails in between the lake and river are actually placed in CAW on space that's in between the lots.  Also, there are fish and seed spawners on the campground as well as a restroom, picnic tables, grills and chess tables.  Not sure how much I want to crowd into it since it's supposed to be a campground in a forest, not some civilized park.  I think I may leave it as is or just add some bushes so that there's still vegetation when zoomed in.  I'll be adding more trees of the same type to create the forest.  I'm seriously considering putting large lots up there as the "reward" area.  Also, all of the spawners are uncommon or rare.  It will be the richest concentration of goodies, I think.  I'm holding off on putting anything from the other countries in, though.  I like to leave those types of spawners out so that there's still a reason to visit the countries now and then.  Not that I would restrict a lot builder from using them, but the neighbors would have to hop the fence to get at them. xD

The First Lot Screenshots!

I made a Test save of my world so that I could place the lots I have so far and give everyone a better look of the neighborhoods and placements.  Most of the community lots haven't been built yet and all of the ones currently in game are thanks to Whisperingtruth.  They match their neighborhoods even better than I had hoped!

Sunnyside and Beach View with health clinic, stadium and sports bar!

Industrial Row with tattoo parlor! (It matches Kazee169's residential lot so well!)

The modern section of the town.  It has the largest number of homes by far.  Not sure if I should split some of them up.

Cherry Lane!  Sans cherry trees, of course.  And the 10x10 mill wasn't installed in my game yet, so I still need to add it.  I think this part will be adorable when complete.  For some reason the waterfalls aren't showing up in game.  Have to see if that's just because it's not an actual exported game yet.

Overall view!  You can see a few of the other neighborhoods like the asian section on the cliff, the mystical forest (sans forest) and the huntsman cottages.  (Okay, you can't see them well... :D)

I've been considering changing the Enlightenment Campground, which can only be reached by teleportation, to a much larger reward instead of just high environment buffs.  What if this were the only area that deliberately had large lots for building homes?  You have to start off in a 10x10, but eventually you get enough skill points or reward points to let you move to a much larger home.  Of course, that's all just an in game story.  Really people could pick one of the lots up there as soon as they started their game.  I suspect that the taxis and mail carriers will just pop into existence, but I need to test it.  And now I have a test save to try it with!

A Note About a Couple 10x10 Lots

Making a note to myself here about the 10x10 lots I've had to clean and two in particular that refused to install until Store objects were taken out.

I had to remove CC objects from the following lots:

Christmas Cabin (multiple CC items)
Hipster Hideout (one CC item)
NM16 Micro Home (one CC item and patterns caused game to crash)
Rustic Modern (multiple CC items)
S-M13 Micro House (patterns caused game to crash)

I had to also remove patterns and/or Store items to get the following two to install:
Castle_of_the_Dark_Chaos
Mini Goth House

I know it will change their appearance slightly, but it's better than them not being in the world at all.

Oh, and some people built all the way out to the edge of the lot.  That last line of squares doesn't usually let you build on it (at least not without a bit of fuss) for a good reason.  When the lot is placed again, even on a perfectly flat lot, the parts out at the very edge of the lot can get pushed to the wrong level/shape.  This particularly happens if CFE was used to build on the edge of the lot.  So there are a few lots that have porches pushed up at sharp angles, and they are all ones that are built to the edge of the lot.  I'll try to catch them and force them level.  Hope I don't miss any.

Major Sculpting Accomplished!

I finished putting in all of the required lots.  Turned out I had underestimated how many spaces would be needed for the residential homes.  But each neighborhood should be ready for lots to be placed now!

I've discovered that I'm not really that good at sculpting.  I'd say I just need to spend more time on it, but I just don't tend to see hills and mountains as more than different size bumps in the ground with some trees stuck on them.  ^.^  I've tried to give it a good little mountain range in the background, though.  I guess they're more like hills.  Turns out the distant terrain objects in the CAW tool are only for use with the largest map, so I'll be setting my own map edges using the camera routing.  I spent a fair amount of time redoing the cliff face as well.  It was very harsh before since it literally was straight up and down.  That made the terrain paint look horrible, so I've added some depth to it and redone the paint to be lighter.  I think it looks a lot better now.  I'm sure it could be even better if I had more talent or patience, but it's enough for me to keep going and not flinch whenever I see it, like before. :D

Next step will probably be to start adding trees and decorations (I put in a little simhenge and made sure the path was routable for sims!).  I still need to work on making the river look better, although I think it's been improved slightly by lowering it into the ground some.  I'm not sure if sculpting or objects are needed to smooth the edges.  Perhaps I need to take another look at it in game.  I can also plant some houses (with a separate save, of course, because I want to always have one blank version to fall back on) and see what the neighborhoods are looking like.  Time to make that separate Sims 3 folder in My Documents to keep it all separate from my main game!  I hope I have enough hard dive space. :/